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RAGGED ISLAND

An exceptional whodunit that simmers with mystery and suspense.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
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A university professor with secrets gets entangled in a murder mystery in Scott’s (Margel’s Madness, 2015, etc.) latest series thriller.

Middle-aged Gil Hodges, director of the University of Maine’s School of Forest Resources, finds a severed finger in his office. As a police detective starts an inquiry, Liz Horvath, a retired professor of psychology and counseling, shows up to talk to Gil about Tiffany Burgess, one of her patients. Gil met Tiffany three years ago, when she was 15 and living on Matinicus Island, off the Maine coast. He hasn’t seen her since, but he knows that the eccentric teen has been periodically breaking into his campus office, taking insignificant items, and later returning them. He suspects Tiffany of giving him the severed finger and also of surreptitiously entering his condo and stealing a small safe. But Gil doesn’t impart this information to authorities—even after Tiffany subsequently appears in his classroom. It turns out that the two share a potentially dangerous secret regarding some deaths back on Matinicus. Gil surmises that Tiffany’s presence in Maine is a vague threat, because the secret involved the professor lying to quite a few people. But then she asks for his assistance in getting back her daughter, whose custody she lost. On the pretense of a family emergency, Gil takes leave from the university and heads to Matinicus to help, which may result in him finally telling the truth about what happened three years ago. But it isn’t long before a likely staged suicide puts everyone on the island under suspicion—with outsider Gil at the top of the list. Readers need not be familiar with Scott’s preceding novels, which also star Gil, to enjoy this third installment. Although the story heavily references an earlier book, the prologue offers some clarification for new readers. The professor isn’t a particularly likable protagonist; he’s known for having inappropriate relationships with his female college students, for example. But he also seems invested in his search for redemption—persistently struggling to improve on what he calls “the old me.” Gil also becomes more sympathetic as the story progresses; for example, he keeps his secret not only due to self-preservation, but also because he believes that the truth will endanger many others. In addition to various mysteries (whose finger is that, anyway?), there are some genuinely chilling moments, as when Gil, at one point, sees signs that a stranger has been inside his home. The conclusion does deftly reveal the killer’s identity, although the person’s motives are a bit convoluted. Still, Scott offers sharply defined characters as well as effervescent detail: “The harbor opens up as we round the breakwater—a semi-circle of small, weathered homes revealing themselves alongside workshops dotted with propane tanks and outhouses; finger piers crammed with wire traps, gaggles of lobster pots, coiled line, and assorted other gear.” Supporting characters also stand out—most notably Al Freeman, who, along with his late wife, raised the abandoned Tiffany as his own.

An exceptional whodunit that simmers with mystery and suspense.

Pub Date: March 20, 2019

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 197

Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing

Review Posted Online: March 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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